United States v. Leon’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
4,606 federal appellate · 1,092 district · 5,796 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16,034 later decisions (162 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Batson v. Kentucky (1986), Anderson v. Creighton (1987)
4,606 federal appellate · 1,092 district · 5,796 state decisions — followed in 48 states
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Appellate journey
reviewedUshio, Inc. v. Copylite Products, Inc (from Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Terry v. Ohio · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Illinois v. Gates · Wong Sun v. United States · Katz v. United States
Cited together with Illinois v. Gates · Franks v. Delaware · Massachusetts v. Sheppard · Brown v. Illinois · United States v. Calandra
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 16,034 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable.”
1,205 later decisions quote this exact passage“The exclusionary rule should not be applied so as to bar the use in the prosecution's case-in-chief of evidence obtained by officers acting in an objectively reasonable good-faith reliance on a search warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate but ultimately found to be invalid.”
38 later decisions quote this exact passage“perform his `neutral and detached' function,”
15 later decisions quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.